Nov. 29 (Bloomberg) -- One fascination in a presidential
race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant and
weirdly overfamiliar e-mails emanating from the Obama campaign.

Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started
receiving messages from President Barack Obama with subject
lines such as “Join me for dinner?” “It’s officially over,”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” or just “Wow.” Jon Stewart
mocked them on his “Daily Show” television program. The
Hairpin women’s website likened them to notes from a stalker.

Still, they worked. Most of the $690 million that Obama
raised online came from fundraising e-mails. During the
campaign, Obama’s staffers wouldn’t answer questions about them
or the alchemy that made them so successful. Now that the
president has won re-election, they’re opening the black box,
Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Dec. 3 issue.

The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by
a large team of analysts, said Amelia Showalter, the campaign’s
director of digital analytics.

“We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject
lines and the amount of money we would ask people for, but on
the messages themselves and even the formatting,” Showalter
said.

The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines -
- often as many as 18 variations -- before picking a winner to
blast out to tens of millions of subscribers.

“When we saw something that really moved the dial, we
would adopt it,” said Toby Fallsgraff, the campaign’s e-mail
director, who oversaw a staff of 20 writers.

Casual Tone

It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most
effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you
might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff said.
“‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.”

Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be
outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg
Businessweek, that message outperformed 17 other variants and
raised more than $2.6 million.

Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which
lines would perform best and worst.

“We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only
reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” Showalter
said. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me:
giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’
buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make
things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly
yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s
eye to.”

Profanity Effective

Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild
expletives such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big
clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such
thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf
life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back
and retest,” Showalter said.

Fortunately for Obama and all political campaigns that will
follow, the tests did yield one major counterintuitive insight:
Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and
won’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent.

“At the end, we had 18 or 20 writers going at this stuff
for as many hours a day as they could stay awake,” Fallsgraff
said. “The data didn’t show any negative consequences to
sending more.”

After a pause, he offered a qualification: “We do know
that getting all those e-mails in your in-box is at least mildly
irritating to some people. Even my father would point that out
to me.”